I find it hard to use a fresh install of OS X without lots of customization. It's nice to enable all the hot corners (to make it easy to get to launchpad, mission control, and the notification center), enable all the trackpad options, and turn on most of the settings in Finder. Use, use use mission control (I usually have 6 desktops between 2 monitors) - I think it's one of the best parts of OS X.

Get the following applications for your Mac, I just converted 1 year ago and these are my favourite applications...Coconut Battery (Battery management), Unarchiver, PixelMator (photoshop alternative), Parallels Desktop (running Windows!), Page (Word, though there's Office), Number (Excel), Keynote (PowerPoint), I use ScreenFlow for screen recording, Final Cut Pro X as Sony Vegas, and Disk Inventory X for file cleaning.

Here are also some extra links that I made for Mac OS X...if you need any help I can make a special tutorial for you.

Click on the in the top left corner. Click on System Preferences. Go through each item and you will learn volumes about MacOS and customize your settings all at the same time. I recommend spending some time playing around in System Preferences. This helps familiarize the entire user experience.

Click on the in the top left corner. Click on System Preferences. Go through each item and you will learn volumes about MacOS and customize your settings all at the same time. I recommend spending some time playing around in System Preferences. This helps familiarize the entire user experience.

Click to expand...

This is exactly what I would have recommended.

And turn off "natural scrolling" in trackpad settings. I find it to feel very unnatural on anything but a touchscreen, but that's just me .

Click on the in the top left corner. Click on System Preferences. Go through each item and you will learn volumes about MacOS and customize your settings all at the same time. I recommend spending some time playing around in System Preferences. This helps familiarize the entire user experience.

Click to expand...

yup - i do this in every new piece of tech i buy, all the way from computers and crazy-complicated software suites i use at work down to things like digital recorders.

Install some form of Antivirus. It might be a Mac, meaning viruses are less likely to target OS X vs a Windows-based PC, but there are vulnerabilities and it's better to be safe than sorry.

I use Sophos

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I recommend avoiding Sophos, as it can actually increase a Mac's vulnerability, as described here and here. 3rd party antivirus apps are not needed to keep a Mac malware-free, as long as the user practices safe computing, as described in the following link. If anyone insists on running antivirus for some reason, ClamXav (which is free) is one of the best choices, since it isn't a resource hog, detects both Mac and Windows malware and doesn't run with elevated privileges.

Macs are not immune to malware, but no true viruses exist in the wild that can run on Mac OS X, and there never have been any since it was released over 12 years ago. The only malware in the wild that can affect Mac OS X is a handful of trojans, which can be easily avoided by practicing safe computing (see below). 3rd party antivirus apps are not necessary to keep a Mac malware-free, as long as a user practices safe computing, as described in the following link.

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